Clamshell macs

 CLAMSHELL HELL

My Girlfriend asked me about Apple clamshell Macs. I told her they were very good little machines and I'd like one in my collection.

She bought herself one on eBay to use as a netbook, as most of us know that's almost impossible, almost.


to her dissapointment the clamshell ran OS9 and had no idea what broadband was. I couldn't configure a connection and the Airport utility was obsolete. it was a WEP passphrase not a WPA2 which isn't going to get me anywhere.

After a bit of digging around online I read that the clamshell Mac could use Lubuntu, a linux based freeware operating system made by Ubuntu. I burned a boot disk and popped it in the disk drive but it didnt work. the clamshell had about 32 mb of ram or something, not enough to run Lubuntu.

While waiting for her power supply to come I thought I had burnt the power board out using a different adapter. so to cover my trail I bought a second mac for spare parts (much cheaper). it arrived and inside it, it had a 512 MB ram stick. So I pulled that out and the boot disk now worked.



 This mac had OSX and OS9 installed, I won't be removing this as I like to keep some things original.














Once I had Lubuntu installed the Linux operating system recognized a generic USB dongle for a Raspberry PI I had and it connect to the Internet no problem. The new OS looked great to my Girlfriend though it broke my heart to loose the quirky apple logos and mac face on boot up. thought the tone still sounds on power up which is great. I bought her a new battery one ebay for £40 and now it works like a modern laptop. though Lubuntu has problems with Adobe Flash and wont run Youtube. I have seen videos of Lubuntu clamshells running YouTube but it looked like it would be way too laggy for her to enjoy anything. This doesn't bother her though as she can listen to her CD's, write her CV's and send emails and browse facebook.

The spare clamshell wont run a lubuntu bootdisk as the drive is an older CD drive. I would have to make a bootdisk on CD somehow but I thought I'd keep it original as I don't need to use it like she uses her laptop. I did however make it see through and remove the crappy airport card and internal DSL modem.


I wouldn't recommend this project to anyone who doesn't understand Hardware and Software that well. it was very difficult to do for me and I had to read hundreds of blogs, watches tons of videos and tinker for hours to get it to work. it cost about £150 probably all together. I bought my Girlfriend the power adapter and the battery and she bought the mac and the Ram (from mine). My own mac took along time to modify into being see through, I have no images of that mod but its pretty simple in a difficult way. you must have a see through mac all ready (one you can see the aluminum shell through the top and bottom) and remove and plating so you get this see through look. I still need to remove the layer on the bottom but its not really needed as you never see that part. This mac needs a new battery and some TLC. but once it done it will be a good Laptop to play a bit of music on. maybe some Beatles and Bob Dylan as Steve Jobs would of had it.